SonySlave
15+ Year Contributor
- 967
- 75
- Jun 24, 2004
-
Pasadena,
Maryland
So, as many of you know, we had the East Coast Shootout 2014 at Cecil County Dragway here in Maryland back on June 8th. It was a weekend full of promise. It unfortunately took and turn for the worst after my 3rd pass. I ended up going into the wall after a massive headgasket failure.
I had been fighting a very uncharacteristic knock issue all day long. I mean off-the-charts knock. I was pulling timing like crazy to try and combat the knock with no success. My AFRs were good, hovering around 11.8-12.1 on all three passes according to my Link datalogs. Each time it knocked, I let out and never got any great runs. My 2nd pass I let out at the 1000' when it knocked and still ran a 10.8@101. On the third pass, I knew something was wrong because I couldn't get up on the converter anymore as you see in the video below. I just coasted out and part way down track I felt a pop and saw the smoke. I got on the brakes and was going to move to the wall and the steering wheel jerked 90* to the right with no warning and threw me into the wall. The pressure in the cooling system ballooned the radiator, blew a hole in the lower radiator hose, and blew the overflow hose off. My engine catch pan caught most of the water that spilled out but I think that it ended up overflowing the pan and got water all over my tires causing a loss of traction that put me into the wall. I was ok after the crash with only some minor lower back pain for several days. I was able to drive the car onto the trailer but it was only running on three cylinders.
When I got the car home I pulled the spark plugs to check for broken porcelain. None. All the plugs looked good. I then did a compression check... 165 155 0 155. Uh oh. I pulled the exhaust manifold and found a very large hole in the #2 exhaust runner. I had burned a hole in the head during the headgasket failure. I and some friends have found that when using high ethanol fuels like E85 or E98 or any alcohol for that matter, when you blow a headgasket, the resulting coolant in the combustion chamber combined with the alcohol and spark burn can cause an effect like an oxy-acetelyne torch and burn a hole in the head very easily. This is what happened in my case. But why? My AFRs looked great and my timing map didn't seem aggressive for E98 fuel. What could have happened? I sent the injectors to FIC and they found that the #2 injector was flowing around 100cc less than the other three. This could easily have caused a severe lean condition in the #2 chamber and caused this to happen. Unfortunate, but that's the game we play.
Thankfully, the car is easily fixable. There is no frame damage and the block survived the failure. The #2 piston was beat up pretty good, so it's getting an in-car piston swap and should be good to go. New head is already in the works. All of the head components survived the failure and are being re-used. Should be back up and running in the coming weeks and should make it to the DSM/Evo/GT-R Shootout in Ohio in August.
Here are the pics of the damage. The pic of me outside the car, you can see the yellow dot in the center, that's my helmet after I threw it as hard as I could. Needless to say, I was upset.
Here is the first angle. Not great quality but you can see it blow up then turn hard right.
Here's a much better video and angle of the crash.
For those that aren't familiar with the car, this is what it should have been doing...
I had been fighting a very uncharacteristic knock issue all day long. I mean off-the-charts knock. I was pulling timing like crazy to try and combat the knock with no success. My AFRs were good, hovering around 11.8-12.1 on all three passes according to my Link datalogs. Each time it knocked, I let out and never got any great runs. My 2nd pass I let out at the 1000' when it knocked and still ran a 10.8@101. On the third pass, I knew something was wrong because I couldn't get up on the converter anymore as you see in the video below. I just coasted out and part way down track I felt a pop and saw the smoke. I got on the brakes and was going to move to the wall and the steering wheel jerked 90* to the right with no warning and threw me into the wall. The pressure in the cooling system ballooned the radiator, blew a hole in the lower radiator hose, and blew the overflow hose off. My engine catch pan caught most of the water that spilled out but I think that it ended up overflowing the pan and got water all over my tires causing a loss of traction that put me into the wall. I was ok after the crash with only some minor lower back pain for several days. I was able to drive the car onto the trailer but it was only running on three cylinders.
When I got the car home I pulled the spark plugs to check for broken porcelain. None. All the plugs looked good. I then did a compression check... 165 155 0 155. Uh oh. I pulled the exhaust manifold and found a very large hole in the #2 exhaust runner. I had burned a hole in the head during the headgasket failure. I and some friends have found that when using high ethanol fuels like E85 or E98 or any alcohol for that matter, when you blow a headgasket, the resulting coolant in the combustion chamber combined with the alcohol and spark burn can cause an effect like an oxy-acetelyne torch and burn a hole in the head very easily. This is what happened in my case. But why? My AFRs looked great and my timing map didn't seem aggressive for E98 fuel. What could have happened? I sent the injectors to FIC and they found that the #2 injector was flowing around 100cc less than the other three. This could easily have caused a severe lean condition in the #2 chamber and caused this to happen. Unfortunate, but that's the game we play.
Thankfully, the car is easily fixable. There is no frame damage and the block survived the failure. The #2 piston was beat up pretty good, so it's getting an in-car piston swap and should be good to go. New head is already in the works. All of the head components survived the failure and are being re-used. Should be back up and running in the coming weeks and should make it to the DSM/Evo/GT-R Shootout in Ohio in August.
Here are the pics of the damage. The pic of me outside the car, you can see the yellow dot in the center, that's my helmet after I threw it as hard as I could. Needless to say, I was upset.
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Here is the first angle. Not great quality but you can see it blow up then turn hard right.
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Here's a much better video and angle of the crash.
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For those that aren't familiar with the car, this is what it should have been doing...
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